Recently, I heard a story on National Public Radio about the symbiotic but ironic roles played by reason and emotion in the process of making choices. A young man who had survived an operation for removal of a tumor on his prefrontal cortex lost the ability to feel emotion. Left with only rational brain function, he was paradoxically unable to make decisions because all options proved equally reasonable to him. It seems our irrational side is primal in the act of making that final choice.

From 1958 to 1965 (according to the info I have found), American Motors produced a series of X-Ray ad brochures, distributed alongside the conventional make/model catalogs at dealerships, targeting the rational element in decision-making in hopes of selling cars. In the guise of factual compilations, they spun info on the turntable of opinion. IMHO, the 32 page 1960 edition was the best of them; it featured a gray-templed man in a white lab coat demonstrating what were claimed to be superior features of Ramblers in comparison to their rivals. Since my first view of the 1960 X-Rays, I’ve wanted to do a parody, and thanks to CC and 50+ years of experience in visual arts, I finally have a theatre for the act and the skills to carry it off. As some of you have noticed, I like to take the chance that my stuff will make people scratch their heads. Following are some of those X-Ray comparisons, pulled from the brochure and re-imagined.

American Motors, under George Romney, if not succeeding to counter the influx of Volkswagens and other imports head-on with the Metropolitan, did score a success by dusting off the 1950-55 Rambler body dies and re-inventing it as the “compact” American in 1958. The X-Ray brochures even take the trouble of making that claim with an asterisk every time they use the word “compact”, leading to a note that declares,”Pioneered by American Motors”. To be sure, the high pockets design of the American, rooted in the early ’50s’ ideal of headroom for Dad’s Sunday fedora, did retain many user-friendly and practical features, and many of the comparisons in the brochures are fair. For example, there was a huge advantage in range given American by its 22 gallon gas tank, compared to the 11 to 14 gallon tanks of its Big Three rivals. But even the most ardent AMC fan had to admit that the “facts” in the X-Rays were sometimes skewed or simply irrelevant.

Lauding the American’s width (not only wider than all the other compacts, but even wider than a standard Rambler by nearly an inch!), the X-Ray leads the reader down a garden path of exterior avoirdupois that doesn’t translate to interior dimensions. Lark, at 3 inches shorter than American, is chided for being “harder to maneuver in traffic” with its “bulky” 8 1/2″ longer wheelbase (How long was the list of adjectives in the meeting that yielded “bulky”?). Unmentioned is the intrusion of wheel wells into the American’s rear seat, severely limiting hip room which, at a meager 45″, was a whopping 15″ less than in the Studebaker (itself a compact refashioned from a standard sized car). And without mandated crash tests as proof, AMC had only gut feelings to back up the claim that American’s thicker doors added to side impact protection.

In the photochop above, I’ve re-imagined the door thickness comparison as a way to promote American’s ample display space for oil-change stickers. Note how the Rambler’s pic is cropped more tightly by the art director, giving the impression of even greater width.

As might be expected, the Corvair is singled out for much of the X-Ray brochure’s scorn, losing to American in 17 direct comparisons (followed by Valiant at 13, Falcon at 9 and Lark at 5). Corvair is criticized for being too low, too narrow and too downright weird. The main complaint lay in the engine bay. “Corvair has twin carburetors that must be kept in constant synchronized adjustment”. By comparison, the spin doctors make Rambler’s ancient flat head sound like the pinnacle of engine design, with its “Iso-Thermal Intake Manifold” cast into the block that “allows engine coolant to preheat the fuel-air mixture, increasing operating efficiency” (intercooler, anyone?). But the 600 lb. gorilla in the comparison was placement. American is implied safer with its front mounted engine whose “mass and weight may help absorb impact”.

In the illustration above, our Technician gestures with shock and surprise at the Corvair’s front compartment, wondering why it looks so darned different from everything else.

The Corvair’s fuel tank is also a sore spot. Not only is it just half the size of American’s at 11 gallons, it’s location is “in a dangerous position” just ahead of the passenger compartment. Implications of flaming catastrophe are in the air with a fuel filler “forward of the driver creating a hazard”, a “hollow front end” that “affords limited protection” and “light gauge bumpers, set flush against the body”.

Above, the Corvair’s front mounted fuel filler puts your alert, uniformed attendant in position to foil any driver hoping to beat the tab on a gas purchase.

Even the Corvair’s transmission indicator is found to be wanting. X-Ray complains about the lack of a Park position in its quadrant, or a modern, step-on parking brake. One is led to imagine the sight of hill towns overrun with driverless rogue Corvairs.

In the above illustration, American’s shift lever signals changes to the engine room, while Corvair’s quadrant indicates a ship dead in the water.

Under X-Rays, Ramblers are taken for granted as superior in every way to the small imports. Hillman shows up in only one direct comparison–in station wagons–easy pickins for the American in a cargo volume shoot out (The Simca Le Chatalaine wagon suddenly appears, takes its lumps, then disappears). But the X-Ray manages to single out the VW for looking “small”, a direct swipe at VW’s most famous advert, “Think small.”. Its only direct comparisons with American are for the diminutive engine and for it’s smallish rear window, of all things.

Above, The VW rear view mirror is criticized for not matching the rear window’s shape.

All in all, the X-Ray does a Senator’s job of calling itself unbiased while claiming Ramblers as the best cars, “in terms of usefulness to the user”. It indulges in double talk to the point where my head spins even while I chuckle at the hutzpah it took to produce such a hagiographic tract under the guise of fact. I’m still not sure what “The New Standard of Basic Excellence” means. This kind of advertising is the domain of the 4th banana, and that makes it rather benign. The X-Ray makes the automotive world a funnier place, and I’m happy with that.

Update: Here’s a late addition of another page.

59 Comments

Funny and very original. Your rewrites of the add copy are great. My salesman father in law told me that his sales tactic for engineers, scientists and other analytical types was to bury them in details. I’m an engineer and it’s true in my case: I over-research most decisions and something like this might have, at least initially, gotten my interest. Their creation of fake/distorted advantages of the Rambler would have turned off buyers if they started to sense it though.

In attempting to parody AMC you’ve ended up proving that their claims were correct. Door thickness may be trivial, but given a choice it’s slightly safer to have more thickness. Corvair’s “trunk” was in fact unusable, especially in 1960 with the spare right in the middle of things. Given a choice, it’s better to have Park on the automatic.

My father was buying his first brand-new car in 1960, and those factors were part of his decision to buy a Rambler. He later regretted the decision because the Rambler developed an unsolvable intermittent electrical problem, but that was more the fault of the incompetent local dealer than the car itself.

Parody often does that. When I got a hold of one of these as a ten-year-old, my Dad had been a Mopar man for most of my life. He was my car nut hero, so I reacted as I might have to publicity for a football team that rivaled his favorite. He got a brand new ’60 a Valiant as a fleet car that year, so any competing car was wrong. Rambler Americans broke the cardinal rule of planned obsolescence: they didn’t change.

What I found funny, and still do, is how these comparisons magnify the importance of traditional features in a marketplace that thrived on novelty.

Nowadays, I would kill to have my Mom’s 1955 Hudson Rambler wagon in Palomino and Cream! (I plan to submit a personal history piece on it.)

This is very funny, Barry! As a lifelong Kenosha resident and AMC fan, even I always thought it was a bit dubious to just randomly pick cars that had a feature where yours was supposedly better. I have, however, seen inner doors on Ramblers loaded up with oil change stickers, so that is a great feature.

By the way, my mother also had a palamino and cream ’55 Hudson Rambler, but hers was a 4-door. Gotta love those squeeze door handles, and those bizarre recessed and ribbed areas on the door tops.

In the late 70s, I was given a full book of Sunoco oil change stickers from a friend’s dad who had a relative at Sun Oil. I thought I had died and gone to heaven! A few years later, my brilliant wife looked at me dumbfounded, and asked why I didn’t just change my oil at 3K mile increments per my odometer. That way, you know exactly when you need to change it just by looking at the odo – when it hits a number divisible by 3,000, time to change. (She worked in an actuarial department of an insurance company.) I have not used my Sunoco stickers since.

… and the fact that no one was using crash bars in their doors at that time. It’s really a head injury that you have to worry about with side impact that doesn’t enter the compartment. My Dad got hit in a FWD Chyrsler in the early ’80s and the whiplash caused him to bonk his head on the side window. He was probably saved by the fact that the firewall took the brunt of it.

Love it! In my youth, I read all of the ad and brochure copy I could find. It became apparent early on that disguising disadvantages by selling them as advantages had a long history in the automotive world. Things like “there is no junior edition Chrysler to devalue your investment” instead of “we have no compact to offer and our resale value will devalue your investment enough as it is”. You have gone one better in taking these ridiculous comparisons and making them brilliantly funny.

This would make a great series, so I hope we have not seen the last of these.

When people are unbriefed in formal logic, or at least informal logical fallacies, they may be vulnerable to sales tactics like you mention. The most deadly question you can ask a salesman (or a camera-hogging cosmologist) is, “How do you know?”

I remember a Chrysler brochure on the Big 3 compacts in 1960 (‘We Family Tested All Three!’), which unsurprisingly found the Valiant to be superior in every respect.

Along with a comment that Corvair’s seats were ‘flat as a wallet before payday’, one superiority amusing even to a kid was a detail photo showing someone opening a front vent window, with the caption ‘Valiant vent windows pull IN to open!’.

Like asking a barber if you need a haircut. I remember Ford offering, by mail, free car-buying guides during the ’70s. You can imagine which criteria they emphasized. Less blatant forms of Conflict of Interest turn up all the time in corporate, government, & NGO PR:

“A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.” — Robert Gascoyne Cecil

Our local newspaper has its “Automotive” section on Fridays, lots of car ads (more than other days of the week) and what used to be some features written about a certain car model or two. I was interested when they recently expanded these writeups (in volume) but looking closer at the writeups they now say something like “advertising” and indeed the writeups are written by the promoter of the cars they are selling, and have nary a negative comment (or if they do, it is bound to be inconsequential or humerous). I used to read these features in lieu of subscribing to a car magazine, but now I skip them entirely, as they really don’t tell you anything much (at least the AMC ads were compare/contrast with competition).

My Dad actually bought 2 Ramblers around this time, he replaced his ’56 Plymouth with a ’61 cross crountry wagon, and replaced that with a ’63 (not sure why he kept the ’61 for such a short time, I’ll have to ask him).
The ’63 was involved in an auto accident 2 years later when we were moving to Burlington VT, I remember that well…maybe that’s part of the reason he moved up the chain to get a ’65 Olds F85 wagon to replace the ’63 Rambler – intermediate rather than compact probably is more metal around you if you get in an accident again.

As for the vacuum wipers, still have to remember Rambler was an economy car, and this wasn’t unusual at that time…recall the VW Beetle which used air from spare tire to “power” the washer bottle spray and you could end up with flat spare if you used it a lot. We take having cheap electric motors everwhere in our cars and otherwise as “normal” now but that wasn’t the case back then when cars were still pretty basic.

Too bad there isn’t a profile shot of the Rambler. “Other cars have boring rear wheels that are centered within the wheel opening. The Rambler, with its off-center rear wheel, gives you something interesting to look at every time you get into your car.” At one point, my parents had two cars: a 1960 Corvair and a 1955 Hudson Rambler. As a result, I’m a bit of a fanboi regarding both Ramblers and Corvairs, and I can remember just how different the two cars were. It was fun to ride in the Rambler, partly due to the “old car” feel of it. The Corvair, on the other hand was just plain modern. Since the 1960 Rambler is basically just a re-heated 1955 model, it’s not just an apples-and-oranges comparison. It’s like comparing an apple to the banana that you should have eaten two days ago. I’m not sure which is more amusing– Barko’s parody or AMC’s gutsy ‘run what ya brung’ advertisng. I like ’em both.

I used to get that same “old car feel” when riding in the 60 Lark VIII that belonged to a friend’s mom. Our 64 Cutlass was only 4 years newer, but that Lark felt simply ancient in a way that few cars did then.

That was the big type on a Range Rover ad at the turn of the century.
It was a true statement, those damn Brit cars did have bigger nuts than
Jeep!

Love the auto industry advertizing. More of this stuff, please.

BTW my grandfather and three uncles retired from American Motors.
I think it was still Nash Motors when Grampa tossed in his lunchbox.
A cousin and I both worked there, me for a very very short time and my
cousin got within sight of retirement and the Chrysler happened.

loved those 70s Ford buyer guides as a kid, not so much for the advice but for the complete pricing and option price guides at the back. too bad it was the mid 70s and you couldn’t build any manual 429 base Fairlane wagons. 🙂

I loved the AMC X-Ray series as a kid – in good part because I thought they were hilarious.

I think AMC was somewhat unique in offering these formal, detailed, comparisons to the public vs other companies offering them as training tools for the salesforce.

For example, we’ve been talking about the Chrysler Master Tech series; this one is for the sales folks, comparing the 64 Imperial to Cadillac. I find it interesting that they are still using the old K. T. Keller hat test in the interior – I thought that thinking was long gone by the 60’s.

Remember that the American competed against the Ford Falcon, which featured equally nautical acceleration in its 1960 version. The Falcon was the best-selling compact of 1960 by a wide margin. If compact buyers were concerned about acceleration, they would have bought a Chrysler Valiant or a Studebaker Lark with a V-8.

For all of the drubbing the American takes for its age, note that, for 1960, its sales actually INCREASED. This was despite very tough competition from the Big Three compacts, and a basic design that dated back to 1950 (or 1958, if we are marking when the basic car was revived as the American).

We can laugh today, but lots of people were literally buying what the X-Ray booklet was selling.

I drove a borrowed ’65 Falcon sedan for a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina and found the acceleration to be more than adequate. Of course it did have the 200 CID six and a three speed automatic, which I do not believe were around yet in 1960. The early 144 CID and two speed would have been a whole other matter….

Thank you for posting this. Last year I purchased the X-Ray booklets for the 1958 standard Rambler and Ambassador, and the 1960 standard Rambler. As you did, I had to chuckle at some of the comparisons, and how AMC attempted to make a silk purse out of sow’s ear. The 1958 booklets actually tout the fact that the Ramblers and Ambassadors came with “vacuum-assist wipers” instead of plain old electric windshield wipers!

The comparisons don’t seem quite so forced for those cars as they do with the American. This is probably because the standard Ramblers were a much more up-to-date design than the American, and the Big Three’s full-size cars were often so outlandish that they really were an easy target. Plus, AMC’s use of unit-body construction really was the wave of the future, just like the booklets said.

The 1958 booklets actually tout the fact that the Ramblers and Ambassadors came with “vacuum-assist wipers” instead of plain old electric windshield wipers!

Electric wipers were not yet universal in the late 50s. Unlike some, including earlier Nashes, the Rambler wipers would not stop entirely every time you got on the gas, because they had a vacuum pump piggybacked on the fuel pump, so as long as the engine was turning, you had vacuum.

The vacuum wipers were on my grandpa’s 70 Hornet too. I remember him complaining about them while he took us for a ride one rainy day. The electric wipers were an option.
It’s fun to watch those old car ads on youtube. There’s one that compares the Falcon to the Corvair. It’s not really a video, but a slide show. I like the one that compares the Ford Econoline pickup to the Chevy Corvair truck. They showed the Ford making a panic stop. since they’re so nose heavy, the very light rear end goes up in the air.

The vacuum wipers were on my grandpa’s 70 Hornet too. I remember him complaining about them

AMC made electric wipers standard in 71 or 72.

On my mom’s 64, the only way you could tell they were vacuum is they would speed up when idling at a light, and slow some when accelerating or pulling a hill, but they never stopped entirely.

What messed some people up is they would need a new fuel pump and the shop would install one without the vacuum pump on it, because it was cheaper. Then the wipers would work like they did before they started using the vac pump.

Barko

Posted January 17, 2015 at 6:53 AM

Vacuum wipers caused anxiety throughout the cabin when going up steep or long hills in hard rain. The driver would reflexively open them to max, so they were either flapping wildly or stopped entirely. Your acceleration phase would carry an element of risk because you would be temporarily blinded just when you needed to see more clearly.

“I can’t see. I CAN see. I can’t see…”

For a kid in the back seat, it was like a cartoon plot, and had a similar effect on your psyche. Kind of addicting, now that I think of it.

Vauxhalls used wiper driven from the camshaft the faster you drove the faster they wiped, If youve ever driven an L series Vauxhall fast in the rain you’d know why slower and nor being able to see is safer.

These pamphlets also attest perhaps to the age of the advertising departments, in the smaller companies. Long-form descriptions were fading in major advertisements, fewer people were willing to bother with them.

Studebaker also published regular comparison guides showing how the Lark exceeded its competitors in every way (15″ tires versus the 13″ on other compacts, heavier gauge steel for strength, versus the ‘thin panels’ used on the competition, again, more attesting to the period of the original design more than anything else). They printed them at least through the ’63 model year. In 1924, they published a pamphlet on how they would never install something as useless and dangerous as four-wheel brakes, and compared their 2-wheeled system to ‘those other manufacturers ‘dangerous systems’. (Guess what was offered as an option on the 1925 Studebaker!)

Perhaps by 1960 the big three had already given up on this sort of pamphlet as ‘old fashioned’, or too-silly? On you-tube there are numerous comparison films available from the same period, showing the stamina, power, and utility of each of the big-three’s offerings when compared to their competitor’s meager vehicles. They’re just as pointless as the pamphlets were, but you don’t have to read them!

I seem to remember a similar type of ad series for the Vega in the mid 70s…when sales were floundering amid the news that was dawning in the U.S. The Vega WASN’T the car GM’s mountain of publicity had made it out to be in 1970.